Author in San Diego

There’s a scene in the animated, family-friendly film “Hotel Transylvania” where Dracula finds himself watching a “Twilight” movie and ripping into those effervescent, ever-present vampires.

“This is how they represent our kind,” he kvetches to the camera.

It’s pure pop culture eating itself, and it shows how far vampires have come since the bloody body count in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel included the Count himself.

Most modern vampires are about as scary as the day is long on Dec. 21.

Mercifully for us and less so for many of his characters, author Justin Cronin just spit out “The Twelve,” the second novel of his “The Passage” trilogy.

Can’t stomach cartoon vampires? Then this book’s for you, because Cronin’s are vicious.

If at first it seems too similar to 2010’s “The Passage,” and Cronin’s reliance on bookish words like “becalmed” prevents transcendence on occasion, don’t give up.

Before too long, Cronin is hurling his characters through time and chase, introducing eerie new elements to his masterful mythology (mankind behind its own destruction, America a wasteland) and dragging readers through 568 pages as if we were vampires and the book were blood.

This book’s so terribly good it’s only not for you if you haven’t read its predecessor. (And if you haven’t, what are you doing reading this?)

“The Twelve” pretty much picks up where “The Passage,” that 766-page monster, left off, charting new courses for surviving characters and introducing new ones — a military veteran, a pregnant woman, a mentally disabled man — who would be clichés in a lesser author’s hands but here quickly become complex and empathetic people.

Both of Cronin’s vampire books are so cinematic in scope, so kinetic, that they fly beyond genre fiction and are as enthralling, emotional and entertaining as any novel. This one may pale a bit in comparison to its predecessor, but honestly, what vampire doesn’t? That it lacks the raw originality of the first book shouldn’t scare you away. And if you read “The Passage” a while ago and don’t remember much, don’t worry.

“The Twelve” starts with a five-page prologue that recaps the first novel’s key passages: A man is infected with a virus. The U.S. government gets involved. Twelve criminals are injected with his blood. A girl is, too. Then: “A great calamity occurred, such that there should be a Time Before and a Time After; for the Twelve escaped and the Zero also, unleashing death upon the earth.” From zero to many, the vampire population takes wing. And the rest is history.

You won’t find plot points in this review. Wouldn’t want to ruin anything else about a world so wrecked anyway. But know this: “The Twelve” is part Stephen King and part Stephen Hawking, part last stand and part long history of time. One character takes a stab at this very thought, comparing what he’s seeing to “a class trip to the end of the world.”

The book is part fantasy and part science fiction, but it reads real. To wit: In a book filled with horror and sadness, the most horrible and sad thing to take place might be the moment one character shares from a time before the vampires, when he was in Afghanistan and two terrorists strapped explosives to their 4-year-old-son — and detonated them.

That’s hardly beyond the pale now. That seems possible in this life, in our time.

Ultimately, the vampires are this book’s accomplishment, but it succeeds most because of its humanity. “The Twelve” is about what one character calls “the rough business of building a life” and the fact that, as another says, “even on the darkest night … life will have its way.”

Consider the poetry of this line: “Their bodies still wanting what their hearts could no longer bear.”

Or the perfection of this: “It’s a hard place you’re in, and my guess is you’ll be in it for a while. But it’s the right one, and it’s yours.”

This book’s hunt for the titular 12 doesn’t really begin until Page 200 or so. But from then on, momentum builds toward the final battle, and pages fly by.

Cronin again imbues his characters with such rich back stories and paints his scenes with such a sense of apocalyptic place that foreboding is always in the foreground.

With 50 pages left and Cronin’s characters a part of you, you may find yourself so gorged on this book that you, too, will need to put it down, sleep on and savor it, leaving the vampire slayers where they are — hopeful, alive — until daybreak.